I speak with customers about mash-ups or situational dashboards, an area of keen focus and lots of effort by our IBM team. Customers related readily to this notion largely due to our common experience with Google Maps where one can put together or mash-up the closest pizza parlor with our home address, for example. Accessing or mashing-up corporate data is another level or two or three of complexity given the associated security issues and numbers of backend data sources (spreadsheets, ERP systems, legacy systems etc).

According to the August 16 Wall Street Journal, pA4, at next month's Democratic Presidential Forum, Yahoo will enable viewers to mash-up the video-taped answers by different candidates to the same questions. An interested voter will be able to observe in video format how candidates A and B responded to the same question at different times and in different locations. There is even talk of a series of Republican candidate forums, hosted by MySpace, which will be broadcast online where viewers will be able to submit questions via IM and vote on the response.

Real time democracy or will those vying for office retreat further to the scripted message?! cperrien

As I prepared for a presentation last week, I required a photo of a bank in San Francisco. Could not find precisely what I needed on Flickr or via a basic search of the Internet. So, I Google-mapped the address and was introduced to the recently launched Google Street-Smart application. Amazing, in short.

Looking at my browser, my computer mouse can literally drive up and down California Street in San Francisco. Up and Back with my mouse takes me east and west; if I rotate the mouse left 90 degrees or right 90 degrees, I see what is on the left and right sides of the street. Two dimensional movement provides 360 rotation!

BTW, the view that I received was not graphics nor animation, but actual photographs (take every 33 feet by specially equipped Google vans) of California Street in San Francisco.

A colleague informed that when he travels he looks up the neighborhood around his hotel on Street-Smart and then goes to Yelp.com for reviews of where to dine, buy coffee, and hang out. No longer strangers in a strange land?! cperrien

It's about advertising on the mobile device, Homer (in a good mood after last night's clever Simpson's Movie). I read this week in the New York Times (7/27/07 page A1 by Miguel Helft) that the next iteration of consumer-generated content will be map-making or map-refining by adding text, audio, and images to existing maps. People are annotating hiking trails, vacation travel, and neighborhood entertainment. Many of the necessary on-line tools are furnished by Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Hmm.

Then I remembered that the gasoline station only a few blocks from my home is not identified on a Google maps search of 'gas stations' near my home address. Indeed, there is plenty of opportunity to improve search results on the mobile device. If the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft want to own search on the mobile device so that they can own advertising revenues related to the results, then my device has better offer me a deep and broad range of accurate results.

Today's local paper (Raleigh News & Observer) reprinted an article by Dave Carpenter (Digital Maps Get Food, Gas, Lodging) describing the acquistiton of Tom Tom by the Dutch company Tele Atlas and the consequent opportunity and challenge to NavTeq, who provides much of the content of Google Maps and high end GPS systems (kind used by the likes of Mercedes and BMW).

Will the NavTeq model of professional cartographers be able to hold sway over the rise of a Wikipedia or Mappedia-like movement of amateur cartographers described in the Times?

If there is to be big money made in mobile search (advertising revenues based upon location), then location awareness has to be thorough and reliable. cperrien

There seems to be a lot of recent work with zooming large images. If you've ever tried to manipulate an extremely high-resolution image, you know it can be rather slow with regular image software or browsers.

IIP did an opensource viewer using Javascript and Ajax with some pretty nice demos here.

Or, check out this offering from Microsoft. The zoom through Notre Dame was particularly impressive.

StreetView is a pretty amazing innovation in GoogleMap technology. It lets you see zoomable 360 degree panoramic views of a location. I'd imagine some folks are pretty excited about this, particularly if they happened to be in one of the images. (Or if their car was captured, perhaps) I wonder what mashups people will make with this. Here's hoping we see more cities added... as of now, I see San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, and New York.

You can also link to these StreetViews, for example, here is the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.